Hi! My name is Ed Gonzales, I’m a Junior Electrical Engineering Student at USC and I’m from Los Angeles, California. Engineering in general to me is just be able to understand something like just being able to understand the world or, you know, some sort of process and not only that, being able to understand but in a way that lets you use it, to improve your daily life, to improve somebody else’s life. And Electrical Engineering to me is just you know, just understanding electricity or circuits or signals. Things like that in order to improve things that you do in your everyday life.
At first I chose Electrical Engineering because I really wanted to do things in music recording but as I started because there’s a lot of overlay between Music and Electrical Engineering, but as I started to get into it, the class is really interesting like one of the math class got really in depth and after that I just kind of realized that you know, maybe I don’t really need to get into this for music recording like I can do other things in Electrical Engineering. One of the things I really like to get into is Alternative Energy Generation because it’s just one of those things where you feel, kind of like a social responsibility; you know, my abilities as an Electrical Engineer expert has to do something with it.
One of my favorite classes at USC so far has been EE202 which is Introduction to Linear Circuits, so basically resistors and capacitors, all those things. And at the end of the class we had a final project where basically our professor gave us a block of wood and some guitar strings and he said “Go build yourself a guitar and the circuit that will amplify the signal, distort the signal and the circuit that will tune the guitar strings.” And so my partner and I went out and just went to the wood shop, carved down piece of wood, sanded it down so it look exactly like a guitar neck and played it exactly like a guitar and we built a circuit that really sounded just amazing. It was pretty complicated but at the end, the reward is so, so worth it.
As for right now, I’m Chief Engineering expert at KSCR which is a student-run radio station at USC and what that entails is basically fixing things when they break, installing new hardware so as far as fixing things like my cable, speak cable otherwise installing new CD players. If a band comes in, I’ll mic them up so I’ll get the best sound of the small little room and that’s usually counted formative often it’s a lot of fun, but otherwise there’s a huge mixing board in the radio station that always needs fixing and, so that involves sorting it and all those things and lots of fun.
What I like about studying Engineering at USC is that all the Engineering students are I’d say most of them are just really willing to work with each other. So if you need help on an assignment or with a project, you can just ask them and nobody is out to like compete with for the best grade. They’re just there to help you. They genuinely want you and you want them to do well so everybody just helps each other out and on top of that, all the students aren’t just doing Engineering they’re presuming things that are bigger and better and more ambitious than just, you know getting an A in class. They’ll have side projects, business ventures, things like that, really interesting things that makes the academic experience so much more rewarding.
Yeah, actually couple of my housemates are Engineers and one of them is Electrical Engineer, too, and some of the things they are planning on doing just for fun or things like FM transmitters so we can wire the whole house to play music from you know one computer or a couple computers, this should be awesome and the other thing would be on the same line is to build something that synchronizes music like flashing lights that’s synchronized to the basic speed of the signs or something like that.
This year I started working at the Viterbi Academic Research Center or VAR where basically I tutor other Engineering students and basically any of the class that I’ve taken so far in Math, Science and Engineering is to take advantage of work. You can walk in if there’s an available tutor or you can also make an appointment if you know ahead of time that you’re going to need help with something, with homework or something like that. The nice thing about that is it’s totally free so you can just walk in wherever you want. No strings attached. Just come in, get help with your homework and walk away happy hopefully.
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